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03 Aug 2015 8:29:45am

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First to reply to the comments of Crank and Barry.

For Crank, I can understand your disdain toward human beings. However we are animals too, so taking a hateful and competitive perspective toward your own species and ignoring the behavior of all other species is simply disadvantageous. Our species is still in the early stages of evolution, so we still have much to learn and systems to change in order to progress. There are 9 billion human beings on this Earth and many of those are kind, intelligent and ethical people, so I don't believe there's a need to form such anger toward the whole race.

For Barry, the hunting of dolphins and small whales in Taiji, Japan is not new. Dolphin hunting has been happening since the 16th century. In fact we in Australia used to hunt dolphins and whales during the early 1970's - 1980's until the MMPA was implemented making it more difficult to hunt cetaceans, along with international public outcry which led to the practice being banned and the alternative of whale watching and dolphin conservation began. This has earned Australia over $100 million dollars per year, far more than what they were earning from drive fisheries.

So, to answer your question, there is no scientific purpose or research, these species are still being hunted in five countries, with the largest and most prominent being that of Taiji in Japan and The Farore Islands in Denmark.

They both claim this is the small islands tradition, despite the fact that traditional hunts caught only a small number of cetaceans, whereas these new drive fisheries have only been around since the 1970's - 1980's and they are heavily overfishing these species like the Japanese fishermen done in Futo and the Iki Islands.

The other claim made by Japan was that the dolphins are competition for their fish stock, however the majority of marine biologists worldwide have dismissed these claims as nonsense.

The main reasons these cetaceans are being hunted is for meat, which is often incorrectly labelled as whale meat to sell to those in Japan who dislike eating dolphin (for it's only a tradition in a minority of small towns), or to sell to their largest financial contributors the aquariums and marine parks from Japan, Korea, Turkey and China who pay around $38,000 USD per captive dolphin and up to $150,000 USD per trained dolphin.

Ultimately petitioning these governments or going to their country rallying will simply be seen as disrespectful toward their culture and make them become even more defensive toward western ideals.

Therefore we need body corporates who disagree with this industry to put in significant financial contributions to create Eco-Tourism industries within Japan and the Farore Islands, in order to employ the towns locals to work on whale watching tours and dolphin feeding conservation lodges, so that they can see how much better this type of work is for them

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